Historicism (history)

This article is about historicism in the science of history. For other meanings, see Historicism (disambiguation) .

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Historicism describes an influential philosophical and historical trend in Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries . It emphasizes the historicity of man, his anchoring in a tradition and the awareness of being shaped by the past, and regards any ideas and institutions such as state and nation not as the rational results of social processes, but as organic, historically produced beings. In historicism, history should not be explained by philosophical or metaphysical superstructures; instead, an understanding of the individuality of the individual epochs and events should be developed.

Historicism is not to be confused with historicism .

Contents of historicism

overview

Historicism assumes that the nature of a thing lies in its history. So if z. For example, to understand the nature of a nation, its history must be considered. Explanations that use (historical) metaphysical drafts are therefore generally rejected. This way of looking at things goes back to Romanticism, which also supported the interest in popular traditions and also represented a counter-movement to the rationalism of the 18th century. Here, historicism is related to the historical school of law , as it was founded by Savigny and Eichhorn .

Based on the scientific methodology, historism rejects large, schematic theories of history that are formulated in the manner of a law. Human creations are not seen as variants of the same scheme, instead the diversity of all historical objects (epochs, people, works, etc.) is worked out. An “individualizing” view is seen as a necessary distinguishing feature of historical studies compared to the social sciences.

Historicism also rejects day-to-day political objectives for historical studies and sees the task of historical studies in showing as objectively as possible “how it actually was” ( Leopold von Ranke ); State history is in the foreground, while social and economic-historical aspects are given less attention. The "transfiguration of the state as actually acting historical subject" was characteristic of the development of historicism according to Ranke. Historicism rejects the progress thought of enlightenment on how he especially in the wake of the Hegelian finds its expression school. An evaluative hierarchization of different epochs or cultures (for example in “higher” and “lower”) is also viewed as inappropriate.

According to Friedrich Meinecke , the core of historicism consists “in the replacement of a generalizing view of historical-human forces with an individualizing view”.

The philosopher Karl Popper used in The Poverty of Historicism ( The Poverty of Historicism ) the terms "historicism" and "historicism", where he met the second the historical and metaphysical concepts of Hegel and Marx criticized '. This has occasionally led to misunderstandings in the English Popper reception, as the English language did not previously make the difference between the two.

Concept history

The idea of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) that the origins of nations lay in a divine-heroic age and that the human spirit knows no other reality than that of history was influential in historicism. Since man created history himself, this is his defining reality. In contrast to nature, history can be understood because it deals with meaning .

In Germany, the term "historicism" appears for the first time in 1797 by Friedrich Schlegel , who refers to " Winckelmann 's historicism" in order to make the "immeasurable difference" between antiquity and contemporary culture of the 18th century clear. He advocates not looking at antiquity through philosophical glasses, but accepting it in its independence. A year later, Novalis used the term in connection with the listing of various methods. Even Ludwig Feuerbach uses the term in a similar meaning as Schlegel, if he means that historical periods are to be recognized in their individuality.

Content development

The story was given a similar meaning as by Vico by Leopold von Ranke . Ranke wanted to distance himself from the previously rather speculative philosophical history and emphasized the need for the most objective and empirically founded work possible. For Ranke, philosophical approaches to history sacrificed the individual and unique to a general idea or system. Ranke and his ideas are considered to be the founder of modern history . In spite of everything, Ranke believed that there are driving forces behind the story, which could be highlighted through the initially appropriate work. History cannot be limited to retelling, but has to make the basic shapes of personalities and events visible in order to check their coherence in the overall context.

In 1857 Johann Gustav Droysen followed up Ranke's loosely formulated ideas in his history . He too emphasized the need to understand history coherently. However, this could not be done through a logical approach as in the natural sciences, but through interpretation . The science of history is, therefore, a hermeneutical science because it is aimed at understanding meaning .

One of the most important representatives of historicism in the later 19th century is Wilhelm Dilthey . Building on the idea that historicism is aimed at understanding and natural science at explaining the world, he re-established the cultural and human sciences as opposed to the natural sciences. He was followed in 1894 by Wilhelm Windelband with history and natural science and in 1921 by Heinrich Rickert with cultural studies and natural science . Reference should also be made here to Oswald Spengler (world as history, world as nature). The trend of historicism was widespread in the Federal Republic of Germany until the 1970s.

Outside Germany, the Italian Benedetto Croce and the English Robin George Collingwood are the most important representatives of historicism. Similar thoughts can also be found with the Spaniard José Ortega y Gasset . Croce and Collingwood also believed that humans cannot be explained by just a naturalistic worldview, because this cannot understand the uniqueness of history. However, they emphasize the rationality of thinking and see in it a counterweight to historicism, which only adheres to contingent principles.

In recent times, Ulrich Muhlack in particular have focused on history in humanism and in the enlightenment. The prehistory of historicism , Thomas Nipperdey , Jörn Rüsen , Friedrich Jaeger and Horst-Walter Blanke dealt with historicism in a positive way.

Historicism crisis

A central question raised by historicism was that of progress in history: Can culture and history be understood as the rise and development of man, as Hegel put it, or does each epoch stand “directly to God”, as Ranke said? Ernst Troeltsch speaks for the first time of the crisis of historicism . Troeltsch saw historicism in a crisis because it gave all historical values ​​and norms the same right and thus resulted in a relativism that undermines modern Western culture: if everything has only grown historically, there are no absolutely valid values. For Troeltsch, this leads to doubts, especially in religion, which he tries to overcome in The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions .

Even Karl Mannheim builds on this issue, however, sees in historicism the possibility of an intellectual existence, which deals with the social upheavals in modern society.

This discussion was triggered primarily by Friedrich Nietzsche's work On the benefits and disadvantages of history for life in 1874. Nietzsche attacks the historicism practiced in schools, which inhibits people in their creative activity by keeping the relativity of their actions and ideas in mind. While historicism previously emphasized that the key to everything human lies in history, Nietzsche is turning this relationship around and emphasizing the numbing effect of historicism on the youth.

Max Weber criticizes historicism for the fact that the historian's point of view is also relative, i.e. H. history appears only in the light of the scientist's own historicity. History only ever answers the questions that a scientist from his historically and socially grown environment poses.

In 1936, Friedrich Meinecke tried to overcome the crisis of historicism in The Origin of Historicism by working out its peculiarity for the German intellectual tradition. He opposed rationalism with a way of thinking that also allows the irrational aspects of human life to be understood. Until then, this genetic way of thinking was the best way for Meinecke to understand people in all their peculiarities.

The young Martin Heidegger and the young Hans-Georg Gadamer also turned against historicism in the mid-1920s, which they had received in the form of the “problem history” of Neo-Kantianism . The fact that their criticism of historicism has largely gone unnoticed in research was attributed to the fact that the opposing position articulated by Heidegger and Gadamer can itself be understood as a form of “second-degree historicism”.

criticism

The historicist direction of historical studies has been criticized many times.

• A frequent accusation against historicism is that of relativism . Since, according to Ranke, every epoch is “directly to God” and has its own justification, which cannot be judged with current value standards, critics say that historicism ultimately leads to complete value relativism. This is also due to the emphasis on the genuinely individual of history.
• Marxist-oriented actors criticize historicism as being conservative and backward-looking.
• Social scientists oriented towards the method and theorising of natural sciences attacked the “individualistic” approach of historicism because they demanded the formulation of general laws for history as well. The use of the word “historicism” in a negative connotation came from this direction.

According to proponents of historicism, some of the criticism is based on various misunderstandings. It is important to distinguish between the principles of scientific work on the one hand and the degree of their implementation in science and daily political activity on the other. Even historians who verbally professed historicism would have "betrayed" it in their academic work or in their daily political engagement. However, this does not invalidate these principles. Moreover, numerous representatives of other currents have made these principles their own without pointing out these similarities.

Historicism and the "German Sonderweg"

Friedrich Meinecke saw an intellectual movement in historicism that separated Germany from the West, whose worldview, according to Meinecke, was based only on the rational natural sciences. He saw this as a “ special German way ” - a view that was asserted against the hostile nations in the First World War. After his experiences in the First World War, Meinecke no longer wanted this special route to be understood as a political one. Meinecke made a sharp distinction between politics and culture and also assigned historicism to the latter.

However, there were also authors who took up this special path as a political one, and so Zeev Sternhell sees the historical image of historicism in the ancestral line of the German catastrophe of National Socialism: “The question is: Isn't the special path of German history the main reason for the failure of the to seek German liberalism since the beginning of the 19th century? Isn't Germany's long abstinence from universal values ​​and from the idea of ​​natural law connected to the fact that Germany never experienced a liberal revolution and that its elites viewed democracy as a foreign concept until the second half of the 20th century ? Didn't the cult of the particular in opposition to the universal and the view of the nation as an ethnic and racial entity contribute to the fact that Germany, strictly speaking, became the instrument par excellence for the war against the Enlightenment? "According to Sternhell, all essentials emerge Assumptions of historicism “from the application of an organic metaphor to society, which is thus seen as a living organism.” Therefore, historicism tends to be associated with ideas that “society can be explained by laws governing living beings be valid."

literature

• Friedrich Meinecke : The emergence of historicism. 2 vols. 1936.
• Georg G. Iggers: German History. A critique of the traditional view of history from Herder to the present. 3. Edition. Böhlau, Vienna a. a. 1997, ISBN 3-423-04059-9 (A Critical History of Historicism).
• Friedrich Jaeger, Jörn Rüsen : History of Historicism. An introduction. Beck, Munich 1992, ISBN 978-3-406-36081-7 .
• Otto Gerhard Oexle : History under the sign of historicism. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1996, ISBN 3-525-35779-6 .
• Helmut Seiffert: Introduction to the philosophy of science. Second volume. Humanities methods: phenomenology, hermeneutics and historical method, dialectics. 10th edition. Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-406-41737-X .
• Stefan Jordan : Historicism. In: Stefan Jordan (Hrsg.): Lexikon Geschichtswwissenschaft. A hundred basic terms. Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-15-010503-X , pp. 171-174.
• Reinhard Laube : Karl Mannheim and the crisis of historicism. Historicism as perspectivism in the sociology of knowledge . Dissertation, University of Göttingen 2002, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-525-35194-1 .
• Günter Johannes Henz: Leopold von Ranke in historical thinking and research . 2 vols. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 2014 (with extensive bibliography).
• Jörn Rüsen: Configurations of Historicism . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1993. ISBN 3-518-28682-X .
• David Schulz: The nature of history. The discovery of geological depth and the historical concepts between the Enlightenment and the modern age (= systems of order, vol. 56). de Gruyter / Oldenburg, Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-11-064622-1 .

Web links

Wiktionary: Historicism  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Remarks

1. ↑ See Horst Dieter Rönsch In: Werner Fuchs-Heinritz u. a. (Ed.): Lexicon of Sociology
2. ↑ Friedrich Meinecke: The emergence of historicism. 2 vol., Munich 1936, vol. 1, p. 2.
3. ↑ Friedrich Schlegel: To Philology I . in: Critical Schlegel Edition . Paderborn 1981, XVI, pp. 35-41.
4. ↑ Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (Novalis), Paul Kluckhohn (ed.): Writings . Jena 1923, III, p. 173.
5. ↑ Ludwig Feuerbach: Critique of Idealism by F. Dorguth. in: All writings . Leipzig 1846-66, II, pp. 143-144.
6. ^ Johann Gustav Droysen, Peter Leyh (Ed.): Historik. Historical-critical edition. Stuttgart, 1977, I, p. 221.
7. ^ Wilhelm Dilthey: The structure of the historical world in the humanities. in: Collected Writings. Leipzig 1924, VII.
8. ↑ Ernst Troeltsch: The crisis of historicism. in: The new Rundschau. No. 33, year of the free stage . Berlin 1922, I, pp. 572-590. Also in: Historicism and its problems . Aalen 1961, IV.
9. ^ Karl Mannheim: Historicism . in: Kurt H. Wolf (Hrsg.): Wissenssoziologie. Selection from the factory. Neuwied 1970.
10. ↑ See Hannes Kerber: The concept of the history of problems and the problem of the history of concepts. Gadamer's forgotten critique of Nicolai Hartmann's historicism , in International Yearbook for Hermeneutics 15 (2016), pp. 294-314.
11. ↑ Siegfried Jäger, Jobst Paul (ed.): "These rights are still part of our world". Aspects of a New Conservative Revolution. Duisburg 2001. pp. 20, 21.